


Aberration By Design

by Scarimonious



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Kink Meme, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:41:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scarimonious/pseuds/Scarimonious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will really hates the term ‘telepath’ because he’s never been able to pick out someone’s conscious thoughts. His specialty has always been the things that go unsaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aberration By Design

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the hannibalkink meme for "actual psychic Will Graham [...] who draws unfortunate attention for his talents."
> 
> Beta'd by the amazing yabamena - you're invaluable.
> 
> Title from [_Speaking In Tongues_ by How To Destroy Angels](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/howtodestroyangels/speakingintongues.html)

The dead only have one story to tell and they always end the same way. See also: Elise Nichols. Will has to admit that he’s missed slotting the fragmented pieces he senses to complete a portrait. He’s yet to find a puzzle he couldn’t finish.

The girl impaled on deer antlers in the field is something new.

He can’t make himself get too close. He doesn’t need to; he can feel it trying to batter its way through his psychological barriers to show him exactly what happened in all its terrible glory.

“He took her lungs. I think she was still alive when he cut them out.” Zeller sounds like he’s about to vomit. Will sympathises with that, but for an entirely different reason.

This one enjoyed it.

It’s a sickening under note, subtle and easily missed. He could look into her dead eyes and try to follow the echo of her last breath, right to that moment of shock – not when she sees the knife, but when she feels it slice into her skin. He doesn’t need this in his head for days, weeks, however long it decides to haunt him. There’s something morbidly beautiful about the entire scene that compels him to stay, to pick up the pieces, to start filling in the edges. ( _He’s staring into the abyss and it never blinks._ )

Will needs to get out while the getting’s good.

He tells Crawford what he can, what he already knew, but couldn’t find the words until now. 

“What about the copycat?” Crawford knows Will well enough to know that he’s picked up on something here.

“An intelligent psychopath, particularly a sadist, is hard to catch. There’s no traceable motive. There’ll be no patterns. He may never kill like this again.” Will gestures toward the scene almost like he’s trying to get the stain off his soul as he ducks under the police tape. “Have Dr Lecter work up a psychological profile. You seem to be impressed with his opinion.” 

It’ll be better for everyone if he stays far, far away from this.

That night, he dreams of a stag covered in raven feathers.

( _Out, damn’d spot!_ )

*

Will doesn’t choose to be unsociable. It’s about self-preservation.

He cannot explain how he does what he does. He usually lets other people come up with a rationale that makes them more comfortable. He’s heard everything from parlour tricks to lucky guesses to intuition to hyperactive imagination. It doesn’t work like that. _He_ doesn’t work like that. Saying it’s something else implies there’s an off switch. It’s really more like a pendulum in a Newton’s cradle in perpetual motion; sometimes his senses can swing free and reach out to someone, other times they smash right into him and all he can do is brace himself for the return hit.

Every day he’s bombarded with a cacophony of thoughts and feelings that don’t belong to him. He’s learned to find a path of least resistance; he talks at his students, he doesn’t listen. He’s gotten good at staring at someone’s chin or ear when having a conversation. He never shakes hands. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s...smoother. He only gets the occasional flicker of something coherent; an empty fridge, the smell of laundry detergent, the roil of anxiety when papers are due. It’s nothing interesting. ( _Not like it used to be._ ) It only goes to hell if he accidentally catches someone’s gaze. His pendulum is suddenly out of synch and he’ll get everything in stunning, high definition, Dolby 5.1 surround sensory overload. The eyes really are the windows to the soul. Or what passes for it amongst the intricate web of neurons and synapses inside the human brain.

He really hates the term ‘telepath’ because he’s never been able to pick out someone’s conscious thoughts. His specialty has always been the things that go unsaid.

Will keeps waiting for someone to ask for a demonstration – guess the number, guess the card, do a reading, something for fun where he doesn’t even try and lies. It’s better than the migraine-filled alternative. 

So far nobody’s said anything. Katz never goes beyond asking if he’s stable and doesn’t seem to care if he’s not. She just bustles right into his personal space, ignores his efforts to retreat from her, and somehow still manages to treat him like a perfectly normal human being. It makes him keenly aware of all his defects. He’s not normal. He never will be. But it’s nice to pretend for a few minutes.

Zeller and Price don’t mind him hovering on the edge of crime scenes or autopsy. They let him do his thing and he lets them do theirs. The lab becomes an echo chamber with ideas bouncing around hard and fast. Theory follows evidence follows theory, each reinforced and discounted accordingly. Science meets intuition and it reminds Will of why he joined the police, the FBI, and why he chose to teach.

The only nagging doubt he has is that maybe they only take him seriously because Jack Crawford takes him seriously. It sits bitterly in his brain like a lingering bad taste.

Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, is outside of Crawford’s purview. He’s like Will; they’re both tangential to the FBI, always by means of something else. Via Crawford, via Quantico, via Bloom, via Baltimore, via Johns Hopkins, via different socio-economic backgrounds, different choices, different lives...they might as well be from different planets. Their lines intersect inside Crawford’s office and Will spends most of the time staring fixedly at the desk in front of him. He doesn’t want to look.

He can feel Lecter beside him like a midnight tide seeping in. If he looks, he’ll suddenly be up to his knees in water. What’s disturbing him the most is that Lecter is so calm, so still. Surely when faced with a board full of missing ( _dead_ ) girls, there’d be some visceral reaction. The water inside Lecter’s head doesn’t even ripple.

Will has this incredible urge to throw a rock at it. He wants to know if the stone would skim the surface, or maybe this inscrutable exterior would crack and the water would come flooding out.

He remains adamant about avoiding eye contact. He focuses on the corner of Lecter’s mouth when facing him. But the urge to look is there. It’s the same dark urge to stick a knife in the toaster, wave his hand under the electric stapler in the file room, or speed up when he spots a stray on the road. 

He manages to escape the room. It feels like getting back to dry land.

*

Will watches Louise Hobbs’ life literally fade away. It slides over his fingers, hot and sticky and too much. Far too much. The pendulum swings. He stares at her staring back at him and the only thing he can think of is a girl, just like all the others pinned to Crawford’s board, just like Elise Nichols. She’s inside the house. She’s inside the house with a knife to her throat.

_Abigail._

He’s on his feet and bursting into the house before conscious thought can catch up with his actions. 

“Garrett Jacob Hobbs? FBI!” he shouts as he moves through the house, his feet taking him down the familiar pathway of a place he’s never been: to the kitchen.

Hobbs has his arm wrapped around his daughter’s shoulders. The knife is a cold flash of metal. ( _So much love._ )

Will pulls the trigger.

And he keeps shooting. He does it for Louise, who hasn’t even gone cold on the front porch. He does it for Abigail. He does it for Elise Nichols and the seven other girls that have been taken. He does it for the copycat, just to deprive the author of the field Kabuki murder of the thing he admires so much. The gun clicks empty far too fast. He needs more bullets for all the families that still need closure.

Will fumbles with Abigail’s throat. He doesn’t want a repeat of her mother.

“See? _See?_ ” Hobbs hisses with his last breath. Will looks up in time to watch him sag. ( _He sees it all._ ) Abigail gurgles and he realises that his grasp is doing nothing to stop the blood. His thumbs press against her trachea and his fingers are near her pulse. All it would take is a squeeze. He could be merciful and make it end quickly. ( _He cannot bear the thought of her leaving._ )

But then Lecter’s there, pulling his hands away and applying proper pressure. He rocks back on his heels and focuses on taking a breath, then another, and again. Just breathe. Breathe and remember that he’s Will Graham, not Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Hobbs is dead. His daughter is not. He can feel himself crawling back into his own skull and staring through the bloody smudges on his glasses. What comes into focus is Lecter’s face. 

His eyes are brown and perfectly normal.

Will hasn’t got any forts left. There’s activity in the water of Lecter’s head, like a current deep within the ocean ( _a feeding frenzy_ ) that’s changing direction toward Abigail. He doesn’t speak. There’s nothing to be said.

Will doesn’t look away.

( _He wonders what it’s like to drown._ )


End file.
